Brief History of Artificial Intelligence

Some important contributions to A.I: in the early 1950's, Norbert Wiener has theorised that all intelligent behaviour was the the result of some sorts of feedback mechanisms. In 1955, Newell and Simon has created the "Logic Theorist", a program that was capable of solving problems by using "tree models" to represent each problem. This program "The Logic Theorist" is also considered by many as the first true A.I program. In 1958, Jonh McCarthy has announced the creation of a new computer program known as Lisp.

Also in 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum a professor of computer science has published Eliza a program that was capable of processing language at a basic level thus giving the impression that the program was a human psychatrist. Eliza is the direct ancestor to the programs that are known today as "chat robots" or chatterbots. Since the begining of computers, the main goal was always to create a machine that could imitate human intelligence. It was though that the first machines didn't have enough power to accomplish that goal. So, through the time, more powerful computers were developed (computers that are faster and has greater storage and memory) but even with this advances, the long term goal of creating a mchine capable to mimic human intelligence has not been accomplish yet. What could be the explanation for this? Computers however fast or powerful that they might be still use a language that is very far from the human, everybody who knows a littlebit of computing have learn the long term fact that computers at there core uses binary to represent everything they do (and basicaly all computers understand is 0 or 1). With the advances of computers, some more advance languages were developed. We have second generation languages such as Assembler and more often in the use today, we have third generation languages that are a littlebit more intuitve than both Assembler or binary. This languages makes it a littlebit more easy to convert an lagorithm written in human language to machine code. We all have some ideas(mostly philosophical of what intelligence is) but still no one so far was ever been capable to translate all that thought into some programming language).the main reason might simply be that that the gap between programming languages in general and human languages is to great. So we might need programming language that are even more intuitive than the ones that exist today. We can't imagine that someone today might have the crazy idea of writting an operating system such as windows all in assembler or even worst in pure binary. The task might be so complex that in reality it might be not faisable. However there are languages like Prolog by example that makes it possible to manipulate logical reasoning threw the program directly, this is a quiet interesting thing but this programs are also very limited in what they can accomplish. What do we have today? We have computer programs that are able to play chess to the level of Grandmasters or even beat chess champions. Such as the famous chess battle between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue, at the end Kasparov the word chess champion at the time has loose his match agaisnt Deep Blue. it has long been thought that if computers were able to play games that requires human intelligence than it would also be possible to create programs that behaves intelligently as well. But this is just a littlebit far from the truth. We also have programs that are capable of recognizing patterns using Artificial Neural Nets (pattern such as handwriting, face regonition ...). We even have have speech recognition (the capacity for a program to interpret in words verbal conversations from a person). But with all this accomplishments, the long term of creating Artificialy Intelligent programs has not been reached yet. That seems pretty far to many Articial Intelligence specialist. Wouldn'n it be great to be able to communicate with your computer directly giving verbal orders and also to have these responses express verbaly by the computers too. Advances in scienttific domains would come much more quicker than today since we would have at hand the most formidable tool of all time.

So far,the history of A.I continues, many progress are made each year in this scientific discipline, but the long term goal of creating a computer program that is capable of learning "Natural Language" such as english or any other languages remains an unsolve problem.

For programers who have started artificial intelligence programming recently